Maria Musgrove-Wethey is Director of The Pantiles Bride & Go Bridal, Tunbridge Wells, UK.
Competition, cash flow, cancelled weddings, computer crashes, rent reviews, negative social media reviews, indecisive brides, obnoxious mothers, know it all newly wed bridesmaid, gay “Bestie” who thinks he’s Randy Fenoli and won’t allow the bride to say “Yes to the dress” until he’s given his blessing! All this and it’s not even fittings season!!
When we hit our Summer season the challenges of being a business owner increase with late deliveries, incorrect dresses arriving, quality control issues, a groaning alterations rail and that’s without the constant communication from brides 24/7 via phone, e-mail, text, Facebook messenger and all other channels in our constantly “on” digital world.
My daughter is a swimmer and her favourite quote is “If you think your sport is hard try doing it while holding your breath”. The bridal equivalent could be “If you think your customer is hard try dealing with a hormonal, yo-yo weight bride and her bullying best friend with a made to measure gown that has zero seam allowance”. Not quite as catchy as the swimming quote but equally true.
It’s not surprising that we turn to the gin, phone a friend or rant on our closed Facebook groups to other bridal retailers! So how do we manage brides (and ourselves and our team) during the Summer season when tempers inside our boutique are rising higher than the sizzling temperature outside.
MEN, WOMEN AND BRIDES!
When I opened my shop in 1997 I had been working for an international training company with household names as clients, living in five star hotels and a huge support team. I presented to audiences of hundreds and they listened and valued my expertise and I was paid handsomely for this! When I opened my first shop I had a huge culture shock and couldn’t believe how demanding brides were. One of my team shared these pearls of wisdom “Remember there are three types of human being “Men, Women and Brides!”
When the going gets tough (and brides are even tougher and more demanding 20 years on) I remember that even the most rational, professional, calm woman can morph into either an emotional wreck or the most diva of bridezillas. And it’s part of our role to be not only her bridal stylist but counsellor, mediator, personal trainer, dietitian, hair stylist, travel advisor – the list is endless!
Confession time – when I’ve got the scent of a sale I can keep up the mask but when it’s fittings time I find it much harder. If you need ways to survive the season then read on for my top tips enriched with some quotable quotes.
KNOWING YOURSELF IS THE BEGINNING OF ALL WISDOM –ARISTOLE
Or the more contemporary equivalent is the Abba song KNOWING ME KNOWING YOU (topical with the new “Mamma Mia Here We Go Again” movie just having been released). They say that patience is a virtue and I know that this is something I don’t have!
I get impatient waiting for my computer to turn on and for the traffic lights to go green! After over 2 decades in bridal and 6 shops later I know that I simply don’t have the patience to be around brides at fittings when they’re obsessing about “to wear a veil or not wear a veil”.
Luckily my manager has the patience of Job and banishes me from the shop floor, otherwise she has to manage both me and her bride and the “bridal tribe”. All this as well as being nanny and children’s entertainer to the increasing number of babies and toddlers that accompany the bride to her fitting. Work out what situations/types of people drain you of energy and what brings you alive. If you have the choice, do more of what you love and delegate to others in your team what brings you down. If you have a small team or no team then at least recognise the situations which may be challenging for you.
PATIENCE IS NOT THE ABILITY TO WAIT BUT THE ABILITY TO KEEP A GOOD ATTITUDE WHILE WAITING JOYCE MEYER.
Now that is easier said than done!! My solution NLP – Neuro-linguistic Programming. Despite the intellectual-sounding name, is a set of practical tools that you can use in everyday situations to gain better understanding of other people, manage your own frustrations and use your insight to get the results you want with the people around you. You can think of it as Practical Psychology.
As a Master Practitioner of NLP I find that one of the simplest tools is the most effective and is called Anchoring, and is done by pairing physical touch with a feeling or behaviour you want to have at your disposal.
The most common use of NLP anchoring is to have a way to intentionally feel resourceful in the right situations. In my situation I want to have more patience with a bride on fittings day. An NLP anchor can grant access to the patience I have in other situations that is not currently available to you when it’s “fittings day”.
Try this experiment with NLP anchoring.
- Determine how you want to feel. Say, more patient.
- Remember a time when you felt really patient. It can be any memory when you were feeling patient, under any circumstances – not necessarily bridal related.
- Choose an anchor device that involves touch, such as touching your thumb and forefinger together or making a fist.
- Remember what you saw, heard and felt in your patient memory. You must put yourself inside the memory as if reliving it. Don’t view the memory from a distance;the feelings won’t come back. You’ve got to ‘be there’ again.
Relive the memory until you begin to feel the patience coming over you in the same way you felt it at the time. As you feel that patience coming on, activate your anchoring device from step #3.
For example, touch your thumb and forefinger together as the patient feeling increases. Release your thumb and forefinger when the feeling begins to subside. If you’ve done this well and there’s no underlying reason you shouldn’t feel more patient, this anchor set!
- Test the anchor by touching your thumb and forefinger together in exactly the same wayagain and find out if you naturally access that patient state. Of course, don’t be sceptical and resist the anchor. Allow it to happen.
I FAILED MY WAY TO SUCCESS – THOMAS EDISON.
If mistakes are made how do you deal with them? Do you make your staff pay? This could be financially (I’ve seen contracts stating that deductions will be made from salary!) or do you berate and belittle them which doesn’t help morale. Thomas Edison had 10000 failed attempts at creating the lightbulb before he met with success. He is determination personified. Of his first attempts he said “I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10000 ways that won’t work!” I am no Edison but I when things go wrong we collectively try to learn and see a negative situation as an opportunity.
LIFE IS ONLY AS GOOD AS YOUR MINDSET – ANON.
I believe that the more positive you are, the more you will succeed. Napoleon Hill in his book, “Think and Grow Rich” identifies the common behaviours shared by the world’s leading entrepreneurs and suggests that our attitudes and beliefs dictate how successful we are.
For example, when you look down your appointments list on a busy Saturday and ask, “What is the target?” you (and your team) would optimistically say, “to sell a dress to every one of them”
And what do you expect to happen?
The chances are, some of your sales people will confidently tell you the target, but expect the actual sales to be less than that. And the chance of reaching the target when they expect not to, is very small!
This is because a person’s expectations have a big effect on their behaviour. If your sales person expects that every bride she meets will buy from her, she’ll start the conversation differently, and manage the whole appointment differently from her colleague who expects that most of the brides are time-wasters and only one in ten actually buys from her. In NLP jargon, this is known as a ‘limiting belief’. It seems true to the person who holds the belief but others can see how it closes down their opportunities and strangles their results.
As a business owner, what do you expect from your staff? And, knowing them all as you do, what do you really expect of the individuals you employ? If you expect that they’ll always meet your exacting standards and achieve a formidable rate of conversion, what impact does that have on them? It’s bound to be different from the impact of working for a boss who assumes you’re going to mess up at least once a week and can’t be trusted to close a sale alone.
If all else fails then THE SMILE GOES ON WITH THE LIPSTICK!
The bridal business is like show business ie the show must go on! If you don’t believe this then you’ve no business being in this business! If you need a boost then trigger that anchor, put on the lipstick and manage yourself, your team and even the season’s most challenging of Bridezillas and remember “Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday!”
Maria Musgrove-Wethey offers coaching and sales training and you can find out more on www.bridalsalestraining.com.
Join her Bridal Business Owners Facebook Group or e-mail her at : maria@pantilesbride.com.